HOLD FAST.

• Author: Dark, Stephen

In a year like no other, University of Utah Health faced off against a pandemic. The first COVID-19 positive patient entered University Hospital on March 5, 2020. Twelve months later, U of U Health Chief Medical Officer Thomas Miller, MD, and Chief Nursing Officer Tracey Nixon, RN look back on how their health care system and employees responded with pride and gratitude for all that has been achieved.

They define U of U Health's fight against the virus as one driven by innovation, determination, and courage.

Miller breaks down the response into four key categories. First was making sure there was enough personal protective equipment.

"We locked supplies down and created monitored distribution of masks, gowns, and gloves to make sure we had enough and wouldn't run out," Miller recalls. University of Utah Health engineers designed and built a location to sterilize N95 masks with ultraviolet light. U of U Health's Center for Medical Innovation built their own Powered Air Purifying Respirators (PAPRs), breathing apparatus that allow nurses and providers to treat COVID-19 patients without exposure to the virus. "The center went to town and built them," Miller says. "Before long, we had hundreds of these PAPRs. It was absolutely awesome." Two hundred were sent to the Navajo Nation. Innovation also came from the community with Project Protect, a collaboration between health care systems and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, among others, to sew five million masks in five weeks.

Testing citizens and patients displaying virus symptoms was also key. With testing kits from its partner, ARUP Laboratories, U of U Health set up testing stations at multiple hospitals and clinics, including Sugar House, Farmington, and Redwood Health Centers. In total, the U tested 412,000 Utahns and identified 47,000 as positive.

Crucial to caring for isolated COVID-19 patients was creating secure spaces with air flow systems that would contain any aerosolized virus. Half of the Medical ICU (MICU) was converted into a COVID-19 unit and a second area was set up as an overflow unit for the MICU--with a third space on standby.

"We have taken great care of our COVID patients and done so under extraordinary circumstances," Nixon says. "It's been an incredibly stressful and emotional year for our teams. Those patients are isolated in our ICUs and, especially in the early months, were dying with only staff members present."

With 3,500 nurses in total, at the core...